After undergoing chemotherapy and a mastectomy in 2004 for breast cancer, Nancy McVay celebrated with family and friends what she thought was the end of her battle with the disease. When she felt painful tremors in her left arm six years later, the possibility of more cancer didn’t cross her mind.

“I thought it was stress-related,” she says. “No one would have thought my symptoms were cancer-related.”

After the tremors and tingling sensations became more frequent, McVay, now 61, went to her doctor where an MRI revealed she had a brain tumor, which was removed in the summer of 2010. The pathology report that came back showed the brain tumor had metastasized from the lower lobe of her right lung, and she received a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis.

McVay’s father died from lung cancer that was linked to tuberculosis he caught during World War II. “Hearing the words ‘lung cancer,’ I lost it,” she says. “I just thought of my father and thought it was a death sentence.”

For many patients, a lung cancer diagnosis is indeed bleak. It’s the leading cancer killer in both men and women in the United States, causing more deaths than colorectal, breast, and prostate cancers combined, according to the American Lung Association. Nearly 160,000 Americans are expected to die from the disease in 2015.

McVay knew the odds were against her, but she didn’t completely give up hope. Once her brain healed, she decided to undergo chemotherapy again, even though she was more than familiar with the damaging side effects from her bout with breast cancer. Unfortunately, the chemo didn’t shrink the tumors, and McVay had to have the lower lobe of her right lung removed in early 2011.

A year later, scans revealed more spots on her lung, and doctors offered her the option of participating in a clinical trial for a new cancer drug.

“I am a very spiritual person, and this is when I started really praying for a miracle,” she says.

The day before she was scheduled to begin the clinical trial in April of 2012, new scans revealed that the spots had disappeared. “The doctors could not explain what happened,” she says, “but I thought to myself, ‘I got my miracle.’”

McVay is not in the clear yet. Since 2012, she’s developed two more spots: one near her spine and another in her pelvic area. Doctors continue to monitor her, but she is not letting cancer stop her from leading a normal life.

“I’m very active, I play golf, I work 24/7 in the real estate business,” she says.

While many living with lung cancer are not able to continue day-to-day activities for long – the five-year survival rate for lung cancer is 17.8 percent, according to the American Lung Association – experts say some advances are being made.

“Many patients with advanced lung cancer are able to continue with a near-normal routine for months to occasionally a few years,” says Loren Friedman, MD, a palliative care physician at Virginia Cancer Specialists, a practice in The US Oncology Network. “Whereas a decade ago there were few treatments for patients with advanced lung cancer, the availability of multiple new treatments are now allowing many patients to live for years with a good quality of life.”

McVay also credits a strong support system of family and friends with her recovery and ability to maintain a positive attitude. “They went to doctors’ appointments with me, which was very important because when you’re getting this information you’re almost in a state of shock so you’re not grasping what they’re telling you,” she says. “They took notes for me. If I hadn’t had them with me, I don’t know what I would have done.”

One of the biggest challenges for McVay is the stigma that comes with having lung cancer. It’s a completely different experience, she says, from living with breast cancer.

“When you have breast cancer, everyone looks at you and says, ‘Oh, that poor woman,’” she says. “But with lung cancer, it’s different. People think, ‘Oh, you’re a smoker,’ or ‘You did this to yourself.’”

Although McVay was a smoker in the 70s and 80s, she quit decades ago. Doctors have identified two mutated genes in her cancer – the KRAS and PIK3CA mutations – both of which cause abnormal proteins to tell cells to grow without regulation, which results in cancer. Unfortunately there are no targeted drug treatments available for those mutations, but clinical testing is underway.

McVay has dedicated herself to spreading awareness of the disease and educating women about lung health as a speaker and volunteer for LUNG FORCE, a division of the American Lung Association.

“We need to get the word out there about how many women are affected by this,” she says. “It’s going to take some time for the entire stigma to go away, but we need to get people talking about it.”